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Nitrogen-enhanced greenhouse warming on early Earth

Nature Geoscience volume 2, pages 891–896 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

Early in Earth’s history, the Sun provided less energy to the Earth than it does today. However, the Earth was not permanently glaciated, an apparent contradiction known as the faint young Sun paradox. By implication, the Earth must have been warmed by a stronger greenhouse effect or a lower planetary albedo. Here we use a radiative–convective climate model to show that more N2 in the atmosphere would have increased the warming effect of existing greenhouse gases by broadening their absorption lines. With the atmospheric CO2 and CH4 levels estimated for 2.5 billion years ago, a doubling of the present atmospheric nitrogen (PAN) level would cause a warming of 4.4 ∘C. Our new budget of Earth’s geological nitrogen reservoirs indicates that there is a sufficient quantity of nitrogen in the crust (0.5 PAN) and mantle (>1.4 PAN) to have supported this, and that this nitrogen was previously in the atmosphere. In the mantle, N correlates with 40Ar, the daughter product of 40K, indicating that the source of mantle N is subducted crustal rocks in which NH4+ has been substituted for K+. We thus conclude that a higher nitrogen level probably helped warm the early Earth, and suggest that the effects of N2 should be considered in assessing the habitable zone for terrestrial planets.

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Figure 1: Temperature change with increased nitrogen inventory from RCM runs.
Figure 2: Radiative effects of pressure broadening and Rayleigh scattering.
Figure 3: Lapse rate feedback.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Met Office for providing us access to the Edwards-Slingo radiation code. We thank R. Buick, D. Catling, R. von Glasow, R. Haberle, J. Kirschvink, J. Manners, E. Nisbet, R. Pierrehumbert, N. Sleep and Q. Williams for discussions and R. Haberle, K. Cahoy and J. Lissauer for comments on the manuscript. C.G. was financially supported by a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellowship. T.M.L.’s contribution was part of the NERC Feedbacks QUEST project (NE/F001657/1), which partly supported C.G.’s contribution. K.J.Z. was supported by the NASA Exobiology programme. M.W.C. received support from the NAI Virtual Planetary Laboratory.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Space Science and Astrobiology Division, NASA Ames Research Center, M.S. 245-3, Moffett Field, California 94035, USA

    Colin Goldblatt & Kevin J. Zahnle

  2. School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK

    Colin Goldblatt, Timothy M. Lenton, Adrian J. Matthews & Andrew J. Watson

  3. Virtual Planetary Laboratory & Astrobiology Program, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA

    Mark W. Claire

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Contributions

C.G., T.M.L and A.J.W. suggested the study. C.G. wrote the RCM and carried out all model runs. C.G., A.J.M. and T.M.L. analysed the climate results. C.G. and K.J.Z. developed the nitrogen budget. M.W.C. calculated the changed solar flux.

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Correspondence to Colin Goldblatt.

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Goldblatt, C., Claire, M., Lenton, T. et al. Nitrogen-enhanced greenhouse warming on early Earth. Nature Geosci 2, 891–896 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo692

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